My Hardware is Broken.

My Hardware is Broken.

Do to some recent setbacks I have been having a hard time staying positive. It’s not that I won’t be positive again; it’s that I am just going through the frustration of, yet again, another setback after my injury.

You see I am a little naïve. I believed in all the recovery promises. That if I went to the right Doctors, followed the rehab protocol, registered with social service and sought out the services that are offered for brain injury survivors and I put in the work, that there would be eventual pay off.

And I worked hard. I spent my first year just relearning how to learn. Putting up with the bureaucratic bullshit of social service, insurance companies and all the rhetoric of a medical system that likes to sound good, but acts in the opposite. Falling through the cracks and missing out on valuable resources.  Dealing with huge corporations who market how “socially connected they are” yet offer absolutely no social resources, care, or concern for anything but the bottom line for them. I stood up I walked, I ran, I ran across the country.

I attempted to go back to school, I took out student loans. I got in touch with the disability resources for going back to school. I worked so hard. I worked until I was exhausted; I put everything I had into it. It did not work.

So I tried again, and again, I worked myself into mental and physical exhaustion.

I screamed for help from government, from friends, from family. I screamed until I had no move voice in me. I have listened to everyone, from shrinks, to psychologists, speech pathologists, brain injury survivors. I have read books, I have gone to yoga, meditation, I have had sleep deprived EEG’s, I have been poked, prodded, squeezed, analyzed, neglected, “at a boy’d”, talked down to, disrespected and disregarded.

I am clinically depressed, I have an anxiety disorder, I suffer from exhaustion because I don’t sleep. I am broke and in so much debt. The banks don’t care about the brain injury, they don’t care about the run, they don’t care about the progress I have made, or how “I have come accept my situation”. That’s great, I accept it. I accept the fact that I can’t work full time. I get the fact that I am “difficult” for other people.  I accept the fact that I can’t be relied upon, that my family won’t talk to me, that my friends have to focus on their own shit and not mine. I accept all of it. Now what?

My computer is broken. I keep trying to change the software, thinking an update or a new version will work. However I keep running in to the same issues. I keep thinking of fixing the software, but it’s the hardware that is damaged. No matter what I do, I can’t fix that. That is hard to deal with. I don’t think I have accepted that yet. I don’t know if I want to accept it.

What will acceptation bring? That I am almost 40 and I will never earn more than minimum wage part time? That my wife and I will never be out of debt? We will spend the rest of our lives working until exhaustion just to stay broke? We will never be able to afford children, a pet, or improve the quality of our life. I accept this. So what?

What happens next? This? This is it? I mean I am not starving, I have a home, I have food in my belly. So I am grateful. So the next 30 or so years of my life are to fight every day, mentally, physically, spiritually, to maintain this.

I am not trying to be negative, I am really trying to see the positive, where is it? The hardware is not going to change, so I need to change my outlook. I get it. How? How do I be OK with this? What steps do I take to accept this reality that this is as good as it’s going to get? How do I be ok with this?